Saturday, February 21, 2009

Granta 104: Fathers Edited by Alex Clark

"A father," says Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, "is a necessary evil." It seems to be the fate of most dads to be remembered with a mixture of affection and contempt. The male contributors to Granta 104 are generally less forgiving than the women. "I don't accuse myself of being a shit to my father because I think perhaps all men are shits to their fathers," writes Michael Bywater, while Adam Mars-Jones recalls how he mocked his father's egotism. "He's always been my antihero," says David Heatley of his father, so the artist turned this "sad, broken little man" into a limited edition wooden toy. On the other hand, Jonathan Lethem idolised his father, with his "Midwestern kindness" and "prairie-gazer's soul", and Benjamin Markovits pays tribute to a father who watched him sit on the bench for two hours every week at his high-school basketball game.

One of the most memorable pieces is David Goldblatt's account of his father, who ran a spanking club called the Red Stripe, and the squalid details of his murder. Goldblatt cried when he opened the boxes containing items from his father's flat ("I mean raging, head banging, animal noise crying"), even though they included some leather paddles and a box of butt plugs.Good fathers are expected to create special memories for their children. The bad father in Kirsty Gunn's "The Father", for instance, fails to keep a promise to take his children swimming. But generally, in fiction, if a father does make the effort to drag his sulking brood outside, it almost always results in an "incident". So it is in two of the best stories here, Justin Torres's exuberant "Lessons" and James Lasdun's tense and menacing "Caterpillars".

It is left to Siri Hustvedt to inject some intellectual rigour into proceedings, though her elegant memoir is marred by a reliance on external authorities (Montaigne, Kafka, Woolf, Harold Bloom) to bolster some overworked aphorisms. Still, it is worth reading.

One of the best features of the magazine is a series of photographs of fathers described by their offspring, including Ali Smith, the cartoonist Alison Bechdel and Sid James's daughter, Reina. "Portrait of My Father" works very well - certainly better than the photo essay of wrestlers, which, given Granta's middle-class readership, comes across as an exhibition of working-class curiosities, however well-intentioned.

So what have we learned? Fathers are distant and rubbish at maintaining friendships, but they can also be kind and effortlessly cool, injecting a little excitement into the domestic routine. As the writer and film-maker Ruchir Joshi observes, we are all probably incapable of being the fathers we want to be. When his Puppa died, Joshi felt "sharp relief that I myself, at least, would never have to face the challenge of being a father". It is satisfying to read in the contributor's note that he now has two sons.

This is the first issue of Granta under its new editor, Alex Clark, and she is serious about discovering new talent. "At a time when the latitude granted to emerging voices to locate and connect with their readership seems increasingly under threat," she says in her introduction, "and when new writing must make itself, more than ever before, easier to define, to package and to market, we hope to say as simply as possible - here is the space." As the recession bites, risk-averse publishers could leave the field open for Granta to discover the literary talent of tomorrow. Who knows, it might just be able to seize the initiative.

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POETRY

Ian Pindar's second poetry collection Constellations (Carcanet) is out now. His debut collection Emporium (Carcanet) was shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection 2012. His poems have appeared in The English Review, The Forward Book of Poetry 2011 and 2012, London Magazine, Magma,New Poetries III, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poetry Review, Stand, the Times Literary Supplement and Wave Composition. He won second prize in the National Poetry Competition 2009, a supplementary prize in the Bridport Prize 2010 and was shortlisted for the 2010 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem).

Praise for Constellations

‘The pleasure of Constellations lies in their lyrics’ easy movement among images and observations, their development less linear than cumulative . . . In such denser passages, where the observations leap from one to another in a momentum compelling both for the intriguing train of thought and for the music of the lines, Pindar achieves “a difficult // furthering; intense, informal immediacy” in his distinctive approach to the lyric.’Guardian

‘Pindar’s 88 brilliant new “constellations” are as haunting as they are enigmatic.’Marjorie Perloff, author of 21st-Century Modernism: The 'New' Poetics

Praise for Emporium

‘Pindar is urbane, funny and profound. A brilliant first collection.'Poetry London'There is real gold in this volume . . . I was about to say that Ian Pindar is a promising poet; but no, he is already a significant one.' Poetry Review

'Some of the most hyped poetry in Britain today has been ruthlessly pruned of any phrase that might ignite the slightest grin. Ian Pindar’s first collection, Emporium, is a welcome antidote. It’s dark, witty and entertaining . . . as ingenious as anything I've read for a while, and few collections have been half as entertaining.'Rob A Mackenzie, Magma‘Here's a poetry that's light, clear, at times almostthrowaway, full of political scope and menace.’ Guardian‘Pindar’s inventiveness and sense of linguistic andliterary history make this an enjoyable collection, holding promise for the future.’Boston Review‘It was about time for somebody to be channeling Eliot, maybe Stevens, Laforgue, and the Metaphysicals to such clashing effect: “bright as a seedsman’s packet”, with unexpected timbres and sonorities sabotaged by glockenspiel accents. Pindar is just right for the job.’John Ashbery

‘In this sparkling debut collection Ian Pindar brilliantly fulfils Verlaine’s injunction to the poet to take eloquence and wring its neck. Emporium offers the reader a beguiling and compendious range of styles and voices, and signals the arrival of a fascinating and original poet.’Mark Ford

‘Ian Pindar’s short, crisp and enjoyable new biography [is] an easy-going introduction to the man and a straightforward route into his work, aimed at people who know little about either.’Josh Lacey in the Guardian

‘Pindar manages gracefully to pack a wealth of information into this brief study.’Gerry Dukes in the Irish Independent

‘Pindar has skilfully made the process of understanding the complex relationship between Joyce’s life and work “funagain”.’Eric Bulson in The Times Literary Supplement